


Wintry Calm

by with_the_monsters



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, Harry Potter Next Generation, Multi, Next Generation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 11:14:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 17,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13739685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/with_the_monsters/pseuds/with_the_monsters
Summary: All the HP fics, headcanons and drabbles posted to my Tumblr.





	1. Bill/Fleur

**Author's Note:**

> Several people have asked me for an easier way to read my HP stuff than scrolling through my Tumblr, so I've finally collated it all into one place. Chapter titles will indicate pairing/character. My headcanons and ideas have evolved and will continue to do so, so please forgive any inconsistencies in ages, occurrences, OC names, etc.
> 
> If I've missed something out or get disorganised and forget to cross-post, please feel free to give me a nudge. 
> 
> Please hit me up with any requests, either here or on Tumblr where you can find me at longclaws.tumblr.com!
> 
> TWs for this chapter: paedophilia references

fleur delacour falling in love with bill weasley because he  _sees_  her. his youngest brother looked and went hair-eyes-teeth-legs, thought  _body_ , thought sex. her whole life, men have been looking and seeing a  _thing_ , not a girl. since she turned thirteen and bud-breasts pressed up against her shirts and boys at school wanted to sit close, men back home lingered too long in hugs.

until she was fifteen she dressed herself in shame before she put any clothes on at all. wore everything a few sizes too big, a few inches too long. draped herself in thick fabrics to hide the body beneath them. never learned that hot eyes on her were the fault of their owners, not her. took the uncomfortable stares and the endless flirtation as a fact of life. was fourteen the first time she dared to say “stop looking!” and met only laughter.

it’s not until she’s nearly sixteen and her sister is turning ten that she sees eyes begin to slide over her and to gabrielle. a friend of their father’s, not even that deep into a bottle of wine, caresses a child-round cheek and murmurs a line from  _lolita_ , eyes too bright and lips too dry. gabrielle flickers a panicked glance around the room. that look is so familiar.the same hour fleur switches her baggy sweatshirt for a crop top and rolls her skirt over two inches. 

they will look at her. never at her sister.

at school, the same. at home, the same. slowly, she learns to be less ashamed of the looking. to play to the object they expect her to be. she comes to scotland and she’s the centre of attention. they hear her name pulled out of  the goblet of fire and all anyone wants to talk about is her legs in that skirt. she defeats a dragon and boys whisper all the dirty things they want to do to her just moments after they finish comparing cedric’s charmwork to krum’s reflexes to harry’s flying. they watch her pass in the hallways and their eyes glaze over like she’s a thing put there for their pleasure. 

fleur lifts her head high and lets the stares keep coming.

then she meets bill weasley, and not long after he asks her how she’s doing. asks it like he really means it, like it matters to him that she still gets nervous going around blind corners, that vines make her skin crawl and that the green flash of a hex makes her mind go too blank with fear to defend herself. he brings her a bottle of his favourite whiskey and sinks deep into it, tells her about his life and his job and asks about that night in the maze she doesn’t think about. he doesn’t look at her legs even once.

the next time she brings him her favourite wine and they share it. she’s giggling and silly by the end of the evening and he laughs with her, laughs at her like an equal and not like a thing he wants to fuck. he takes her to her door and leaves her in the care of her friends and he doesn’t do it because he thinks it’ll make scoring easier next time. doesn’t decide his actions based on which will result in sex the fastest.

he doesn’t ask her out until he’s laid himself bare for her, doesn’t even touch her until she reaches down and presses her fingers into his. the first night she feels brave enough to go home with him he keeps her up at the kitchen table until three am telling her all the things he likes about her. her physical appearance doesn’t even make the top one hundred. he says,  _how much you love your sister. how fierce you look when i take the last croissant. that funny french way you roll your ‘r’s. how you try to tell me jokes but laugh too much to finish them. how you know exactly how many children you want, and the precise shade of blue you’ll use to decorate your nursery. the bravery of you. the way your mind moves so fast sometimes i can’t keep up with it. the fact that i think you could do my job ten times as effectively as i can._  they fall asleep on top of his covers, fully clothed, and the next morning fleur has to say  _yes i want this i am sure that i want this_  ten times before he starts to undress her.

his family call her all the things she’s heard a million times before. fleur lifts her head high and lets the insults keep coming. his brothers still sometimes look at her like they’ve forgotten to see a person, his mother mutters under her breath about fleur’s lack of suitability, his sister takes every opportunity to express her dislike. they see her beauty and they think they know her. they watch her move and they think she’s nothing more than her body and face. 

but bill weasley  _sees_  her. and fleur will not let anything—not a war, not lycanthropy, not a disapproving family—take him away from her. 


	2. Albus, James & Lily

albus potter is not his father. for all that he looks like him, for all that he talks him, albus potter is not his father—

no more than lily is, no more than james is. they reflect him differently, little pieces of the boy who saved the world scraping through their skin when they’re not looking. in the right light, anything they do looks like it’s trying to be heroic. lily has never known how to tell them all that just being this takes all the courage she’s got. just waking up every morning and facing a world that expects her to be magnificent when she can barely keep a lid on the things inside her head. james looks at himself in the mirror and he thinks  _my grandfather’s brown eyes my grandfather’s name my grandfather’s height my grandfather’s low laugh my grandfather my grandfather–who am i? who would i be if nobody looked at me and saw him?_ james looks at himself in the mirror and he thinks, _i don’t think i like the person looking back at me._

albus wears his gryffindor tie too tight so the shame of having had to ask for it can choke him every day. he pushes his hands deep into his pockets when people ask him when he’ll be trying out for seeker and laughs it off, the shaky wretched fear of heights inside his breast clawing to get out.

lily wears her slytherin tie loose and daring, exposing collarbone and freckles. she learns fast to pick every fight that comes her way. james finds her one evening behind the quidditch changing rooms with bruises all up one arm and he just tsks and teaches her how to throw a punch and mean it. if their father took to heroism like a dream then lily takes to fighting just the same. eventually, people stop saying a potter should never have been a slytherin.

all three get harry’s courage, his too-sharp tongue, his narrow determined face. james talks to snakes when he knows nobody else is around to hear. albus spins his phoenix feather wand between his fingers, the movement so compulsive his mother makes him take up drums just to give his hands something else to do. lily doesn’t wait for trouble to look for her; she goes out and finds it and bothers it until it fights back. they get harry’s worried brow and harry’s gentle hands and harry’s ability to endure.

most of all they get harry’s helpless, hunting heart. they take the love he showers on them and they return it but they warp it, try to pretend it isn’t there. try to pretend that he’s just any old dad for all that he’s the boy who lived. it’s hard enough to be a teenager without everybody else wanting to get close to your dad. wanting some of his fame to rub off on them. they know their dad just wants to adore them. just wants to have the family he was so long denied. but to let anybody else know they want him to? how can they admit to that? they’ve spent so long insisting they don’t want it. insisting they don’t need it.

they crush their fearsome love in both hands and try to tell themselves it isn’t there. but it is. it is it is it is.


	3. Ginny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) i just adored your post about fleur delacour!! thank you so much for writing it! tell me, do you have any thoughts about ginny weasley you might be willing to share?

Ginny is used to seeing Tom Riddle out of the corners of her eyes. It’s something she made peace with a long time ago. There will never be a day when she doesn’t have to double check that dark-haired boys with pale sharp cheekbones aren’t him; when she doesn’t break out in a cold sweat if a well-dressed young man lingers too long on his sibilants.

She’s okay with it. She is. She’s read about trauma and PTSD, she’s talked Harry out of shuddering nightmares enough times to know she’s not alone.

Harry dreams of red eyes and white hands. He wakes up and they talk about it, their voices calm and quiet over the pillows. She’d never tell him but the way he comes to frightens her—slowly, slowly, like lifting out of quicksand; then all at once like a car crash.

It occurs to Ginny quite regularly that they have been damaged by different men. Lord Voldemort is Harry’s haunting, distant and impersonal and implacable. But Tom is Ginny’s, and he is immediate and  _personal_. Warm, slithering. A boy rather than a monster. Somebody she loved and trusted, not so very long ago.

She never knows how to tell people that he left some part of himself inside of her. That he hit Harry with a Killing Curse and gave him visions, scars, Parseltongue. Grand and mysterious afflictions, magical and terrifying. What Ginny got is smaller, crueller, dirtier. He left her with this incoherent longing—some frightened eleven-year-old version of herself that lives somewhere near her stomach and pines away for the boy called Tom who wrote such thoughtful things to her. Who  _understood_  her.

She knows that Tom is Lord Voldemort. She knows what he was. But that tiny trodden-down part of her still clutches a worn black diary in both hands and mutters,  _I knew him he knew me I knew him he knew me I knew him he knew me_.

She never tells Harry about that. Nor about the dreams that are more wisps of feeling than dreams—arms around her that don’t belong to Harry and a Slytherin tie against her face. The deep low drawl of Tom’s voice, the way fear and desire blend into some all-consuming whole.

He used and abused and violated her and she still comes out of dreams of him crying for the wrong reasons. Then crying harder for the betrayal of herself she has committed.

_You know what he did to you_ , she tells her reflection when she struggles out of bed and faces it down across the room.  _You know_.

_I know_ , her reflection says back, its eyes too dark and its lips too red,  _I know and I’m furious about it. I’m desperate for it. It fills me with rage. It fills me with hunger_.  _I’m so angry I could die_.

_I’m angry too_ , Ginny whispers back. That’s all she will ever admit to, even in the dark and the quiet. All she ever  _can_ admit to.

It has to be anger. Anything else would be unbearable.

Besides, she’s always been good at anger. She thinks that’s something that’s her own and not Tom Riddle’s. 

She hopes, anyway.


	4. Daphne Greengrass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) talk to me about daphne greengrass

daphne greengrass finds it difficult to love things. she gets that it’s an emotion that is expected of her but there is so little around her to love. she keeps a small list in the back of an old diary, held shut by old charms and a warped padlock tiny enough that a pixie couldn’t pick it open.

the list is easy to remember: astoria. her father, on a good day. her brother aeneas before everything happens with the second war and she scratches him out, hollow-eyed and ferocious. that’s it. that’s the list.

her mother tells her  _you will learn to love more than this one day_. a husband, maybe. a child, definitely. daphne tilts her head, eyes bright with scorn, and demands,  _the way you learned to love me?_

her mother turns her head away.

she’s a good little pureblood girl, believes in all the things her father tells her, runs elegant fingers over his death eater mask and thinks,  _maybe i could learn to love this_. she may not love her mother but she could worship the ground her father walks on. still, this isn’t about him. it never is about him.

(the three-thing list was a lie. there’s a fourth item, shameful and secret: daphne greengrass loves to fight. it doesn’t matter what or who or how so long as she’s got adrenaline spiking through her system and her fingers tight around her wand or her tongue tight around an insult. at school there are plenty of things to fight—other girls, teachers, idealists, idiots. lesser people.

after hogwarts, picking a fight is so much harder.)

when she runs into ron weasley six pints deep in some trendy muggle bar in soho, she only goes over because she wants a fight.

but he is worn out, wrung out, desolate somewhere inside.

daphne’s attitude slides from dangerous to curious. she wants to pick him apart. boy-king, wonder-sidekick, the twenty two year old hero slumped at a seat in this bar with his wedding ring still tight around his finger and his hurt on his sleeve like a brand. she wants to unspool his thoughts, this man who is supposed to have everything.

everybody knows that weasley and granger are meant to be. that this is a temporary blip. a tiny break, a speedbump in their path to happiness. they’ve got a daughter, after all. daphne’s heard pansy retch over it a dozen times—picture perfect mudblood granger and her darling little angel.

afterwards, daphne isn’t sure who she was trying to punish. weasley? granger? potter? maybe even draco or blaise or pansy, with their snotty expressions and their horror at the thought of tangling with a blood traitor.

anyway, she finds a new thing to fight. her baby, red-haired and stunning, skin like ivory and eyes like coal. daphne hates her. daphne loves her. daphne pours over her like a dragon over gold, plotting all the ways she could reveal her to her father and his wife and the swathe of destruction they could cause.

she’s never sure why she doesn’t do it.

it’s probably because of the child herself. leonora grows up like her mother—vicious, vindictive, itching every second for a fight. for lack of siblings she antagonises daphne, the pair of them wild as fire.

daphne understands her mother, suddenly, when lo is fourteen. she understands how you can hate something the world insists you love.

leonora saves her mother the bother, in the end. she goes to find her father herself, blows up his picture-perfect family in a single afternoon at the tender age of seventeen. daphne has never been prouder.

granger comes to find her afterwards, wrecked and looking for someone to blame.

“how could you let a child become that destructive?” she wants to know. “how could you teach her that it’s okay to enjoy pulling people’s lives apart?”

daphne looks over at her. steady, steady, steady. hermione granger, full-time heroine, poster girl for all things good. daphne looks and looks and looks.

“destruction is relative,” she says at last. “do you know that, after the battle, they burned the death eater dead? my father and my brother, they tossed them onto a pile and set them on fire like dogs.  and the worst thing is—“ she pauses here, tries to gauge if this is registering with hermione at all, “—the worst thing is aeneas was on your side. he tried to fight our father off and when he died your good side took one look at him and decided he must have been against you. pureblood, right? he must have been against you. so you burned him like he was nothing at all. not even worth putting in the earth.”

hermione holds her gaze. daphne has to give her credit for that.

“if i taught my daughter how to destroy,” she says to hermione at last, “it’s only because your lot taught me first.”

hermione leaves after that, quiet and thoughtful.

three days later, ron weasley turns up on daphne’s doorstep with their daughter at his side and a strange bright conviction on his face.

“i think,” he says carefully, his eyes not leaving hers, “that we ought to talk.”

daphne greengrass finds it difficult to love things.

this is not a problem ron weasley has ever had.


	5. Draco/Hermione

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (ratclanqueen) do you ship dramione (at any stage of their lives) & have any thoughts on them??

it happens late.

the sunset years, ginny calls them, smiling into a glass of wine. sunset, hermione thinks fondly, watching the way the light catches the still-fiery shine of her sister-in-law’s hair. ginny’s been a sunset her whole life: expansive, flighty, the kind of pretty that makes you feel sort of achy inside.

the thing is that they’re not sisters. not any more. and hermione isn’t a sunset. she’s a fifty-five year old with an ex-husband and two twenty-something kids she can’t relate to and this isn’t really what her life was ever supposed to be. there was supposed to be a graceful glide into old age, ron deepening her laughter lines every year. instead she’s got a sleek modern house and an empty bed and two kids whose minds move in such alien ways to her.

what she also has is draco malfoy, though she doesn’t precisely realise it yet.

it starts as a work thing. they’ve orbited each other since school, each too weighed down by their shared history to make it past polite acquaintances. they nod at each other in the halls, sometimes. mostly hermione just pretends to be absorbed in some courtroom notes. nose in words. that’s the sort of person she is to him, so it doesn’t make much of a difference.

it changes after ron leaves.

not much. not enough to leave ripples. but enough that hellos join the nods. enough that he stops her in the ministry one day and hands her a magazine with a page folded over and says, “hey, sorry, i saw this article and i thought it might interest you.”

hermione watches him the whole time she’s reaching out to take it. it’s a leftist magazine,  _five magi_ , and something about knowing draco malfoy reads it has changed the way she feels about him.

she reads the article that afternoon in her office, legs curled up under her like a teenager, hair pushed haphazardly behind her ears.

she finds him two days later in the lunch queue at the cafeteria.

“your man has some completely ridiculous opinions about gnomes, and i don’t know where he got his facts about house elf life expectancy from, but—”

draco interrupts her. there’s something alive in his eyes. something hopeful.

“but he has a point, don’t you think?”

hermione can’t help reflecting his expression back to him. half-smile, rueful, surprised.

“yeah. i do think.”

after that she brings him a piece from the prophet about wizarding interference in muggle trials and they tear it to pieces together over sandwiches. hermione keeps laughing in a way she never did with ron—sharp, biting, illicitly thrilled at the casual cruelty of his words.

the thing is that hermione granger’s always sort of been a sharp object.

a knife in the hand of a villain is a murder weapon, right? but put it in the hand of a hero and suddenly the same knife is a saving grace.

hermione starts to think a lot about where lines are drawn. about context.

it isn’t until twelve lunch time discussions are followed by a half dozen dinner conversations that hermione realises this might be a thing.

actually, that’s a lie. it isn’t until draco’s walking her home (he insisted, like it mattered, like he knew she could get herself back fine but wanted to do the right thing) and he catches her hand in his and she doesn’t even think about pulling away.

they don’t sleep together for months. every time they get close hermione feels this searing panic— _ron, it’s been nobody but ron for decades, what if there are things about myself i didn’t know i should be embarrassed about_ —and draco lets her bolt. he lets her like he’s almost glad that she does.

it happens after too much wine, not the way hermione would have wanted it. there’s a lot of anger. a lot of shame.

the second time it’s so much sweeter hermione could die of it.

by the twelfth time, she can’t believe she was ever afraid of it. of him. of being exposed, vulnerable, open to him in a way she never could have dreamed.

she tells ron last. harry finds out because their children might be grown-ups but they gossip like thirteen-year-olds and rose walked in that one time and obviously james then let it slip at dinner, because james potter has only ever met one secret he could keep.

the kids know before anyone. hermione thinks she might be a bit relieved about that. it’s the easiest way to disseminate the news without actually telling anybody herself.

she doesn’t want this to be a big deal. it isn’t. it’s just—draco. her and draco, in a new way. a new configuration.

anyway, she tells ron on a saturday. she turns up on his doorstep when his new wife and too-old daughter are out and she just comes out with it.

“i’m seeing draco malfoy. i’m sorry i didn’t tell you.”

when ron smiles, he looks fond as anything.

“’mione, i know,” he tells her, eyes crinkled. hermione reaches for the ache that should rise at how content he looks and can’t find it. “he told daphne yonks ago. i’m happy for you. he seems really proud.”

hermione isn’t sure what to think about that. it could be any number of ways.

but then that night she comes home and finds draco asleep in her bed, his hair a little too long and the line of his jaw softer than it used to be—and she thinks  _okay. this is okay._

she’s lying, of course. okay doesn’t even begin to cut it.


	6. Lily Luna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) i would love to hear more about/what happens to your lily luna

**one**. The first time somebody sells a story about Lily, she’s eight. It’s at Victoire’s seventeenth birthday. It seems like half of Hogwarts has been invited, and a Ravenclaw girl catches Lily in the garden talking to a snake.

The next morning, half a dozen headlines scream, HARRY POTTER’S DAUGHTER TURNING TO THE DARK SIDE?

The picture they use is Lily gap-toothed and beaming at the party, a sunhat rammed over her pigtails and daisies woven into her hair.

One of them superimposes a Dark Mark in the sky behind her.

She never likes daisies after that.

 

 **two**. The first time Harry and Ginny sue a newspaper on Lily’s behalf is when she’s eleven. Some witch with a gift for technological spells gets a long-range photo of her through her bedroom window, changing out of a white blouse.

One paper dares to publish it. The caption doesn’t bear repeating.

Harry has always supported free press. He invested personally in five new papers when they were established after the war. He’s given speeches, columns, galleons and galleons.

His donations dry up after that.

 

 **three**. Lily asks the Sorting Hat to put her in Slytherin.

Albus comes looking for her after.

“You could have asked for Gryffindor.” His voice is ragged, bereft. “You should have asked for the house you wanted.”

“I did,” says Lily, and tugs his Gryffindor tie so tight he’ll have to spend forever unpicking it.

 

 **four**. When she’s thirteen, the rumours go around that she’s sleeping with her father’s twenty four year old godson. When she’s thirteen and a half, some of the rumours say it’s actually a teacher and some of them say it’s Wesley Bones, the seventh year the whole school’s in love with. Some of them even say it’s Scorpius Malfoy, her brother’s best friend.

James finds her in the grounds and prises her away from her friends.

“Why d’you let them think it’s true? Why don’t you say something?”

Lily shrugs. She’s wearing her hair in pigtails again and the tips reach her waist.

“They’d just make something else up if I did.”

“Doesn’t it kill you, hearing them say it?” James sounds desperate. “Because it’s killing me, Lil.”

Lily tilts her head sideways. Funny. She’d thought James would get it better than anyone.

“How could it ever?” she wants to know. “How could they ever touch me?”

They already have, that’s the thing. They’ve been stirring up her insides since she was born.

 

 **five**. When she’s fifteen, her father’s godson takes her to a Muggle clinic for an abortion.

“You should tell the father,” Teddy says in the car on the way home. “He has the right. You and Scorpius have been a thing, friends with benefits, whatever, for months. He’d—”

“It isn’t Scorpius,” says Lily. “And I’m not telling him.”

 

 **six**. Lily dreams of the baby she might have had for months after that. Boy or girl, it would have had its father’s russet-blond hair and her narrow face. Harry’s narrow face.

The thing is that she didn’t want a baby. She just wanted to punish the people closest to her.

Lily Potter’s awfully good at blame, and it’s her family she holds accountable for what the world has done to her.

 

 **seven**. Rose comes round the summer between Lily’s fifth and sixth years at Hogwarts. Lily lets herself be dragged into her room, even though she and Rose have never really seen eye-to-eye.

“Sorry about your mum and dad,” says Lily.

“No, you’re not.” Rose isn’t even bothered about it.

Lily’s mouth lifts on one side. It’s almost a smile. “Hugo’ll be happier with the divorce. Their fighting sent him batshit.”

“I’m not here about Hugo. I saw something.”

Lily can’t help her curiosity. Rose has never exactly been forthcoming about her Sight.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s about you at school. If you go back this September it’s going to be bad. Really bad. I think you should try to stay behind.”

“What is it?”

Rose is white as snow. “I’m not telling you. Just don’t go.”

 

 **eight**. Lily goes.

Of course she goes.

What happens is that a boy in her year—Hufflepuff of all the houses—sells a tell-all to the Daily Prophet after she pushes him just a bit too far. Lily’s list of sexual escapades, the dalliance with that teacher, the truth about Wesley Bones, the fact of her pregnancy. The list goes on. It tells the truth about Lily finding the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, the time the boy met her in the corridors carrying a Basilisk tooth and picking flakes of snake skin out of her hair.

Lily’s parents take her out of school.

The papers shriek about mental health issues and bring up the Dark Side thing again.

Within two weeks, Lily has disappeared.

 

 **nine**. She doesn’t come back until she’s eighteen and calm with it, her hair dyed blonde and her eyes too wise.

“Two years of total peace,” she tells her best friend when she’s home. “James took me to Ireland. This little cottage. There was just me and this village full of Muggles and nobody knew who I was at all. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

Cloe is sceptical. “You spent two years bumming around with Muggles in the arse-end of nowhere?”

Lily tilts her head. Her smile is familiar and wicked. “Actually, there was a bit more going on than that. This dragon reserve—it’s over there, all secret. They take the crazy ones. The dangerous ones.”

She pulls back her sleeve to show a silver burn scar, twisted around her forearm like jewellery.

“It just made sense out there, somehow. All of it. The stuff inside my head got so quiet.”

Cloe still looks like she isn’t sure. “Two years? Really?”

Lily sounds aching when she replies. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, Clo. Nobody talked about me. Nobody spread any rumours or whispered about me behind my back. I was just Lily, you know? Just Lily. All that mattered was how I was with the dragons.”

“You liked the dragons?”

“I loved them. I loved them so much I could die of it.”

“You might still,” warns Cloe, and Lily laughs at last.

“I might still.”

 

 **ten**. The day James gets married, Lily flies in from Mongolia on a species of dragon nobody’s ever seen before and cries the whole ceremony through.

“You cut your hair,” accuses Albus before the reception, tugging on a short, short curl.

“A dragon singed it off,” Lily replies, and dances away laughing.

It isn’t that she’s okay, now, at twenty one. It’s just that she’s better, and better counts for a lot with Lily.


	7. Ron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) I don't know if you're still in the hp fandom (let's be real tho, once ur in there's no getting out!) But what are your head canons on Ron as a dad, I always imagined him as a stay-at-home dad :)

Ron Weasley is a good father. That’s the first thing to say. You wouldn’t necessarily think it if you could spy inside his house but he is. He’s a good father. Anybody could tell you that.

When kids come into the shop, Ron knows exactly how to behave. He’s the fun dad-figure, naturally paternal, the one who’ll encourage you in just the right amount of mischief and then sweep you up and cuddle you until it’s better when you get hurt enough to cry.

He’s all big-displays-of-affection and wearing-emotions-on-sleeves. He doesn’t do well with rational, logical discussions about feelings. He couldn’t dissect his children’s emotions down for you. He couldn’t chart the best way to deal with them over coming days. What he can do is intuit what’s caused sadness and promise to make it go away. He can do comfort—oh, he does comfort so well. Steaming mugs of hot chocolate and a listening ear for as long as you need it. Big hugs, woolly dad sweaters, the circle of protective arms to let you know you’re safe and loved. So very, very loved.

The problem is that his children don’t want that.

Rose is a grown-up at three years old, plagued by visions she won’t admit to and clinging so hard to the cold logic she prizes in her mother. She doesn’t know what to do with a father like Ron, who always says the wrong thing in his ferocious desire to be there for his daughter and who can’t write love sonnets but who knows exactly when and why his wife needs her favourite meal cooked at the end of a long day. Rose doesn’t want hugs. Rose wants to understand feelings and rationalise every reaction she comes across. Hugs don’t help her do that.

Hugo shrinks from exuberant displays of affection, slides away from hugs and shivers when you touch him for too long. He stares owl-like at his father when Ron tries to sit down and have a hearty conversation about the day. He flinches away from casual arms-around-shoulders. Ron tries so hard to remember but this is his  _son_ , and he can’t shake the instinct to wrap him away from the world.

So Ron Weasley is a good dad, but he’s not the dad best suited to his children.

It’s when his marriage breaks up, ironically, that he gets to be the dad he’s always tried so hard to be. The daughter he never knew about turns up on his doorstep one afternoon. All Ron can think as she walks into the kitchen is how like Rose she looks. They could be twins.

“I’m Lo,” the girl says, staring Hermione down. “Leonora. I’m sixteen. My mum says he’s my father.” Her accusing finger finds Ron, shrinking and desolate in the corner.

Ron doesn’t have to be as quick as Hermione to get the maths done. He remembers the night with Daphne Greengrass clear as a bell—the sick shame that followed like an Unforgiveable Curse to the gut.

“You’d kicked me out,” he says after Hermione has banished Lo and Rose and Hugo to the front room and put a muffling charm on the kitchen. “You said you never wanted to see me again. I was drunk, Hermione, I was drunk and sad and stupid. I was twenty-two years old and I thought you never wanted to see me again.”

Hermione throws a glass at his face. “I was depressed!” Her voice is nails on a blackboard. “Rose was three months old, she wasn’t sleeping ever, I had post-partum depression, you knew—you  _knew_! You knew I didn’t mean it.”

Ron spreads his hands. Helpless. “I thought you did. That time, I really thought you did.”

Twenty minutes later he’s standing in the front garden with a suitcase in one hand and his unexpected daughter by his side. Rose and Hugo are watching from the front window, their expressions so guarded. He wants to prise them open and beg them to forgive him.

“Mum has a spare room,” says Lo, picking at her fingernails. “If you want.”

Ron turns to her. So like Rose—but those eyes. Dark as a broken promise.

“Better not,” he says, and lifts one shoulder in an awkward shrug. “It’s been years.”

“Sixteen,” agrees Lo. Then she smiles, and it’s like sun breaking through clouds. Ron can’t believe how much it makes her look like him.

He goes to Percy’s, because Percy won’t tell if he’s asked not to, and his daughters are too wrapped up in themselves to pay any attention at all.

Over the next month, Ron gets divorce papers and a new house and no word from Rose or Hugo at all. He writes them a letter and blurs half of it with tears.

Lo plucks it off a side table when she’s round one day. She keeps coming back and Ron hasn’t figured out what to do about it. He isn’t sure he wants to do anything, truth be told. The fact of another daughter is like a miracle he feels too slow to appreciate.

“You sound desperate,” says Lo, and scrumples the letter up before he can stop her. “Don’t be desperate. It was sixteen years ago and she’d kicked you out. You don’t owe anybody any apologies.”

Ron finds himself coming over dadly before he can help it. “What—yes, Lo, I do. I did a terrible thing.”

“You were on a break.”

“We were married. We—listen, I’d made a promise. A commitment. And I broke that. I had a newborn daughter and I left Hermione to deal with her and her depression all by herself.”

Lo kicks her feet up onto the sofa and gives him a wide-eyed stare. “She  _kicked you out_.”

“She was ill.”

“Not your responsibility.”

“I love her,” says Ron, knocking her feet down. “She was my wife. Of course she was my responsibility.”

It occurs to Ron, as he stares his new daughter down, that maybe she’s been taught very different ideas about responsibility.

“You don’t have to carry other people.” Lo’s voice is bored. She’s already done with the argument. “Let ‘em go if they’re dragging you down.”

Ron sits down across from her and reaches for her knee. He shakes it gently. “You can’t always do that, Lo. Sometimes you have to stick it out.”

It isn’t until later until he realises that’s the first time they’ve touched.

She doesn’t brush his hand away. She lets it rest there, considering. When she doesn’t argue back he takes it as a victory.

More wins come slow and sure. She comes to him to tell him that she’s got all her OWLs, except from Herbology because, come on, plants are boring, and anyway who wants to concentrate on plants when Professor Longbottom has got his sleeves rolled up and those lovely forearms on show and—

“Merlin, Lo, shut up,” says Ron, and reaches to cover her mouth with his hand. “Neville is one of my  _best friends_. He’s old enough to be your father!”

Lo pulls his hand away. “I have absent daddy issues,” she replies, truculent. “My psychiatrist says I need a positive male role model in my life.”

“You’ve got one now,” Ron says. “Tell me what you got in Care Of.”

Rose got all Os, obviously. Hugo’s on track for the same. Ron is fiercely, achingly proud of them, but then he’s listened to them debating new technological leaps and decades-old case law and impossible philosophy for years. Everyone in the family expected the Os.

There’s something about Lo’s face when she shows him the single O in Transfiguration that lights something up inside Ron. The quiet, secret pride on her face. The irreverent delight when she admits that she was predicted As if she was lucky.

It feels harder won, somehow. More precious.

During the Christmas holidays she comes to him in a flurry of indignant tears with a suitcase in either hand.

“Mum’s pissing me right off,” she growls when he opens the front door, her eyes raw and red. “She’s being a real bitch.”

“Don’t talk about your mother like that,” says Ron, and steps back to let her in. He might still be avoiding talking to Daphne but he’s not letting that slide easily. “And watch your language.”

“Leave me alone.” Lo lets her suitcases fall from her hand in the hall and then sits down right there and bursts into fresh tears. “Her new boyfriend doesn’t like me. Thinks I’m spoilt. Keeps trying to make me go back to school for the holidays.”

Ron is down on his knees and gathering her up in his arms before he knows it.

“Stay here, then,” he finds himself saying later over hot chocolate. “I’ve—um, there’s a bedroom for you. If you want it.”

She goes pink behind the mug. “Really?”

“Really. One for Rose and Hugo too. Just, you know, in case.”

Lo’s hand creeps across the table and squeezes his. “Just in case.”

The amazing thing is that Rose comes. Right after the most awkward Christmas dinner of all time at the Burrow, she comes over. She’s not surprised to find Lo sprawled on the sofa playing Xbox.

“Saw she’d be here,” she admits to Ron when they’re alone in the kitchen. “I, um—just wanted to check on you. Make sure you’re not starving to death.”

“I seem to remember doing all the cooking, young lady.” He’s teasing, mostly. He still can’t believe she’s come.

Rose stays for tea. She sits and has an actual, civil conversation with Lo. Ron has the sneaking suspicion that they rather like each other. From the back, they’re impossibly alike. He watches them in the sitting room, playing Xbox in companionable silence. Occasionally Rose turns and laughs at what Lo is saying and it isn’t until Lo does it back that the spell of similarity breaks.

Rose has always had Hermione’s smile.

Weeks roll on. Lo goes back to school but she calls him more and more and more. Her mother is taking holiday after holiday, chasing love around the world.

For the first time in his life, Ron has someone to utilise all that crashing comfort and affection on. He goes up to Hogwarts and takes Lo out for lunch to distract her. He tries to visit Hugo at the same time but his closed-off son is more closed-off than ever.

It’s Lo that bridges that gap. She marches right out of the Slytherin common room, up to Ravenclaw and drags Hugo out by the ear for a walk one weekend. Hugo sulks the whole way to and from Hogsmeade, but the next time he pitches up without complaint.

It’s funny. Ron never thought an illegitimate daughter would be the thing that brought him closer to Rose and Hugo.

It doesn’t stay too acrimonious between him and Hermione. She reaches back at last. When she says she’d be willing to give it another go, Ron’s astonished to find himself saying no.

“I think I’m better,” he admits to her, head hanging. “I love you. I always will. But I think this is better for us both. Honestly, I’ve been flailing behind you and the kids for years. Since they were born, it feels like. You discuss Quantum Mechanics over breakfast and all I’ve got to talk about is Quidditch. It just—I think this is the right thing for all of us.”

Lo moves in with him when she graduates. She doesn’t really say she’s doing it, it’s just that one day Ron realises she’s taking up three wardrobes and his porch is full of Jimmy Choos and two thirds of the stuff in the house belongs to her.

Because he’s a good dad, he nags her constantly about getting a job and moving out. Also because he’s a good dad, he secretly hopes she’ll stay with him just a little while longer yet.

And when Rose decides to move in for a year or so, just while she’s got a job close by…well, that’s fine by him too.


	8. Poppy, Daisy and Euan Longbottom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) I was wondering if you ever write about kids of Neville Longbottom? Do you subscribe to the Frank II and Alice II thing that seems so popular in fandom?

Neville has always known that he doesn’t want to name his children for his parents. Harry does it with his first son, and that’s fine by Neville, but it just makes him even surer that it’s not the path for him.

He struggled enough with expectations as a kid. He doesn’t want to lay that on his children.

His and Hannah’s daughter is born seven months after James.

“Let’s call her something pretty,” says Hannah, unable to look away from her daughter’s face. “Something simple.”

Poppy Longbottom doesn’t have a name with a lot of weight. She’s just Poppy. Pop, to most people that know her. She is kind and good and she has a wild streak wider than her parents know what to do with.

When her younger sister arrives, Neville pulls Poppy into his lap and says, “What d’you reckon, Pop? What kind of a name should we give her?”

“One like mine,” says three-year-old Poppy. She already knows she wants her sister to be just like her.

Daisy Longbottom, as it turns out, has all her sister’s sweetness and none of her boldness. Daisy suits her in a way her parents can’t articulate. Fragile and small, but resilient too. Daisy goes down quick but she always bounces back in the end.

The final Longbottom child is harder. There aren’t so many flower names for boys. Neville and Hannah pick up and discard name after name. Baby Boy Longbottom comes home from the hospital still nameless, and it isn’t until he’s two months old that things come to a head.

“We can’t keep called him Baby Boy!” Hannah’s voice is cracked, tired. This one is harder than the first two. He exhausts her. Some days it’s all she can do to drag herself out of bed. “He deserves a name.”

Helpless, Neville ticks off the ones they’ve tried. “Florian, Aspen, Rowan, Celyn…”

Poppy, four years old, spreads a picture book of plants on the table and jabs at a tree.

“Linden!”

Hannah’s mouth twists up. “Too American.”

“Berkeley?” Neville hates it before he’s even finished saying it.

Hannah gives him a frosty raised eyebrow in response. “I’m sorry, did he turn into a puppy when I wasn’t looking?”

They go for a walk in the end, desperate for inspiration. Neville carries Daisy on his shoulders and leads Poppy by the hand, and Baby Boy doesn’t stop screaming the whole time they’re out.

“Here,” says Poppy at last, pulling away from Neville and reaching for bright orange-red berries, “he might be hungry.”

“Poppy, no!” Neville brushes the berries frantically out of her hands. “They’re yew, they’re poisonous.”

Poppy looks back at him steadily. “I  _know_.”

There’s a beat, and then Hannah bursts out laughing.

Baby Boy Longbottom becomes Euan Longbottom that afternoon. When Hannah’s grandfather writes from Glasgow to say how pleased he is about them using a good, old family name, Neville and Hannah laugh so hard they cry.

Euan Longbottom is never as sweet as his sisters. He doesn’t follow Poppy into Gryffindor or Daisy into Hufflepuff. He goes into Slytherin, so fast the Hat barely touches his head.

“Maybe we should have named him something simpler,” says Neville quietly, one night when Euan has just turned sixteen. “Something pretty.”

“Berkeley?” suggests Hannah sleepily.

Neville groans and shoves at her, gentle and content.

“There’s nothing in a name,” Hannah whispers later, her voice soft and warm. “It’s not a destiny. It’s just a name.”

“Just a name,” repeats Neville, and kisses her in the dark.


	9. James Sirius

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) colour me curious, i really want to know what lily meant that james would understand it the best. what can you tell us about james sirius??

Depending on who you talk to, James Potter is a whirlwind or James Potter is the devil or James Potter is just a sad and misunderstood young man. Nobody seems sure of anything apart from his cool. That he’s got nailed down. The tattoos, all barbs and claws and hooks. The leather jacket, worn and just the right amount of snug around his shoulders. The girls, trailing in his wake like petals on the wind.

Everybody thinks they know him and nobody has a clue at all.

“You want to talk about it?” says Teddy one night when he finds James wild-eyed in Camden, shivering out of his skin.

“Nah,” lies James, and lets his best friend Asta tug him back into the party.

The thing about James is that he lets everything get to him. Lily’s accused him of this a million times. He lets the expectations weigh him down. He plays Quidditch because of course he’d play Quidditch, he’s Ginny Weasley’s son. He cheeks teacher in school because of he’d cheek teachers, he’s James Potter’s grandson. He gets into trouble because of course he’d get into trouble, he’s Harry Potter’s firstborn. The eldest. The one.

“Who are you?” Lily demands of him when she’s fourteen and he’s seventeen, her hands on her hips and her skinny frame blocking the doorway so he couldn’t escape if he tried. “Who do you even want to be, James?”

“This,” lies James, tugging on his jacket. “This is me.”

Lily loves him but she doesn’t get it. She could never get it. What they say about her bounces off her, slides away like water off grease. But it sticks to James. It sticks so strongly he can feel it trailing around after him.

People think they can say what they like. They think he doesn’t care. And James makes them think he doesn’t: laughs at insults, answers smears on his sister’s honours with his fists, goes out and parties harder every time some magazine says that he parties too much. People say, “you don’t deserve to be Harry Potter’s son. He deserves better than this,” and James rolls his eyes and lights another cigarette.

His brother Albus nurses grudges, cooks them up deep and slow inside his chest. James nurtures the hurts. Every single tiny thing anyone has ever said to him, nailed up on the walls of a secret room beneath his ribs. He feels them flutter every time he takes a breath.

“Talk about it,” demands Dominique one night in Edinburgh when they’re drowsy with marijuana, leaning into each other on her sofa. “If not to me, then to someone.”

“Nothing to talk about,” lies James, and gestures for the blunt. “Pass me that.”

Three days later in a pub, Aaron Jordan finds him and claims the seat beside him.

“Is it true you’re Jemima Peakes’ baby daddy? She says you are.”

James blinks. He remembers Jemima. He remembers her being definitely pregnant the first time they slept together.

“No chance.” James’ best friend is there. She’s scornful, bored already. It makes Aaron shift in his seat. Asta has that effect on people. “Didn’t she have the kid, like, a month ago?”

Aaron tries not to quail under the weight of her disdain. She’s got her hair pulled back into two tight braids, and it makes her eyes look wider and deadlier than usual.

“Could be mine,” says James lazily. He’s not in the mood for a fight. And what does it matter, anyway? An illegitimate kid at nineteen is exactly the sort of thing the papers will love—and who is James to deny them extra sales?

These are the sorts of lies he likes to tell himself.

“No way,” replies Asta. She glares at Aaron like it’s his fault. “She was three months gone by the time she and James fucked. Unless there’s some freaky Voldemort magic shit going on there, the baby’s someone else’s. Hardly a surprise, really.”

“Easy, Nott.” James slings an arm around her shoulders. “We’re hardly in the position to judge someone for getting around.”

“You’re not, maybe,” sniffs Asta, who’s been holding onto her virginity in the hopes of getting alone time with Quidditch star Hawkley.

“Fine,” concedes James, and gets up for another pint.

The next day,  _Accio!_  runs a headline about an unnamed girl lying about her baby’s paternity to try to claim grandchild support off wizarding hero Harry Potter. Online, the article gets 300 comments in two days ripping her apart for trying. Jemima withdraws the claims after that. James can’t admit to being relieved.

Comments sections don’t usually work in his favour.

Anyway, the headlines change two months later when James gets photographed punching Faolan McLaggen in the face at a nightclub in Soho.

“You arsehole,” says Asta, examining his mangled knuckles with contempt. “Pick a fight with someone built less like a bulldozer next time.”

James feels his pride prickle. “It wasn’t a  _fight_. I knocked him cold.”

Teddy makes him go and apologise. It takes him six solid weeks of guilt-tripping and bribery, but eventually he manages to drag James to the McLaggens’ family farm in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.

Predictably, Faolan’s fit sister opens the door. James is too gloomy about having to say sorry that Teddy manages to start flirting first, which just puts a further damper on the whole day.

“Heard you’re into hardcore drugs, now?” asks the sister, whose name James wasn’t paying attention to. “Was the fighting and drinking not enough?”

James just shrugs. There’s no point arguing. People salivate at the prospect of believing the worst of him. Everybody just  _loves_  that Harry Potter’s son is such a disaster.

“Look, let’s just go,” he says to Teddy.

And then this guy walks in. He’s solid, ephemeral, beautiful and fair as a unicorn. James’ entire stomach twists up into a knot.

“This is Eirnin,” says the sister, “my brother. Think he was the year below you, Potter?”

James is well-practised at disinterest. He nods, once, at Eirnin, and turns away.

They meet again at a polo tournament. He’s dragged Asta along, because this is exactly the kind of snobby and homicidal pureblood sport she’s into, and she’s spent the entire match complaining that he’s watching the sidelines instead of the game.

“What are you even  _looking_  at?” she demands, and follows his line of sight. She stops when she finds Eirnin, shirtless and glazed with sweat, frantically rubbing down one of his father’s kelpies as it comes off the field.

“Oh,” she says, and then turns to James. Her eyes bug out. “ _Oh_.”

James doesn’t say anything at all.

What develops with Eirnin—it isn’t easy. James has never been vulnerable about another person before but he just…can’t help it. Eirnin is steady as ice and generous as a saint. But he’s also Catholic— _really_  Catholic—and James is somehow relieved to discover that Eirnin is more worried about him being a guy than about him being James Potter, with all the baggage that entails.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Eirnin whispers one night, his mouth against James’ neck. “I just—”

James digs his fingers in to the soft tanned skin of Eirnin’s back. “I don’t know either.” Beat. “But let’s do it anyway.”

He feels Eirnin smile against his throat.

It still isn’t easy, even after that.

But it’s better.


	10. Scorpius & Albus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) could you tell us about scorpius and albus?

“Hey, Potter.” Scorpius chucks a magazine onto Albus’ face before he’s even had time to sit up. “We made the front page again.”

Albus picks up the rag. It’s  _Accio!,_  tied for the worst publication in Wizarding Britain, and there he is. His mouth is twisted up to the side in the photo; it’s a smirk he learned from Scorpius himself.

He drops  _Accio!_  pointedly on the floor.

“What’s the story this time?”

“Oh, you know.” Scorpius flings himself onto the opposite sofa and pulls out his iPhone. “The usual. Secret gay love affair, etcetera, etcetera. Kind of insulting they can’t come up with anything better.”

“Well,” says Albus, heaving himself up, “look at us. Who could blame us for having a go?”

“Right on, mate.”

Scorpius leans over to knock knuckles, and then goes back to his phone. Albus gets a flash of bare breasts on the screen and rolls his eyes.

“You could do  _so_  much better . Saggiest tits I’ve seen in months.”

Scorpius grins and doesn’t look away from his phone. “Well, since your angelic little sister won’t let me at hers any more, I’ve had to lower my standards.”

“Fuck off about my sister,” says Albus, but without any real heat.

Later, they head out to Soho. Scorpius is wearing the most horrendous salmon-coloured trousers Albus has ever seen. Sometimes he can be the most ridiculously posh wanker. Albus is just waiting for him to duck into a shop and buy a crate of Dom Perignon to get the night started. It’d hardly be the first time.

They make it to their club of choice. Muggle, rammed, with a swanky VIP section and overpriced drinks. The bouncers let them in without a word, and as they stroll past the queue explodes into whispering.

“ _Hey, isn’t that—”_

“ _Oh my god, I think that’s the Vine guy. Yeah, you know him! I showed you his videos. He’s done like a million_.”

Scorpius slides a smirk across to Albus.

“Fucking Muggles,” says Albus, but he’s grinning. Internet fame is a weird thing, but he quite likes it. Plus it gets him free drinks in non-magic establishments, and growing up as the son of Harry Potter makes you very used to getting shit for free.

They get shown right into the VIP section and throw themselves down. Scorpius orders a bottle of Dom and one of Grey Goose right off the bat. Albus doesn’t bother to hide his eye roll.

“Hey, if you want to go buy cheap alcohol, you be my guest. If I’m getting drunk, I’m doing it  _right_.”

“Snob,” says Albus.

“Cheapskate,” replies Scorpius, and beckons the fittest girl in sight over.

The next morning, Albus wakes up next to an unfamiliar brunette with a raging hangover. Emerging from his bedroom, he finds Scorpius sat at the table eating take-out breakfast. He’d ask if that really is caviar in the omelette, but he’s known Scorpius long enough to assume the worst.

“’Nother spread.” Scorpius pushes three tabloids over at Albus. They’re on all the covers, falling out of the nightclub together and being gestured at rather rudely by the bouncers.

“Not about our love life today?”

“Nah.” Scorpius jams extra omelette into his mouth and flips one of the magazines open. “This one has a two-page opinion piece on how I’ve corrupted you. No way the offspring of Harry Potter could turn out so frightful all by himself.”

“Um,” says Albus, reaching for coffee, “I’m pretty sure I corrupted you. At Hogwarts you were just a snotty, spoilt little rich kid until I made friends with you.”

“Fuck off.” Scorpius doesn’t look particularly offended. “At least I bucked the family trend.”

Albus rolls his eyes. “Let it fucking go. So my dad was Gryffindor, and what?”

“Your sister went into Slytherin. I went into Gryffindor. Look at us, not being our dads. Brave or what.”

“Oh, get fucked,” says Albus, and throws one of the magazines at him.

So he asked for Gryffindor, it doesn’t mean anything. Probably would have been put there anyway. He didn’t need Slytherin. Not the way Lily did. Not the way Scorpius needed Gryffindor.

Albus eyes his best friend up as they sit there. He’s got caviar on his chin and his hair looks like it’s seen the wrong end of a hedge, but he’s still got that effortless rich-kid elegance. The elegance that says,  _I’ve never had to worry about a thing in my life_. _Not money, not attention, not behaviour._

When he first made friends with Scorpius, he wanted that for himself. Now he’s got his own kind, and it’s better. His says,  _my father saved the world. Tell me no one more time._

It’s funny. Albus always thought being nice would get him furthest. But the older he got, and the more tabloids picked on him and rumours circulated and people exploited him and his siblings for any extra attention or money they could get…well, he understood that selfishness can get you a whole lot further.

That’s the truth of it, in all honesty. The greatest gift Scorpius ever gave him. The ability to look around him and not give a fuck about any of it. It’s a debt Albus can never repay.


	11. Weasleys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) hi im not sure if you got my previous ask or if you're still doing hp asks, but what do you think the weasley family would be like during holidays when everyone got together?

It’s mad. That’s the easy answer. But then every big family getting together is mad, so what’s the difference? This cousin falling out with this, these two siblings playing a game in a corner that’s fun until someone starts crying, one uncle pulling a card out of his pocket that says “no religion” on one side and “no politics” on the other, and waving it in the face of various family members to no useful effect. Family. Loud and mad and awful and wonderful.

Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The Weasley family, for all their dramas, are essentially a happy family, and therefore like the others. The individual can be miserable without the overall whole being dragged down, and that’s proved nowhere more so than The Burrow at Christmas.

Look at the individuals: Here’s Teddy Lupin, wearing an appalling knitted sweater with a reindeer on the front and chasing shots with Young Molly and Dominique in the back sitting room, all of them so drunk by dinner they’re leaning into each other and laughing so hard at nothing they cry. Here’s Victoire, wishing she had a hand to reach for, trying so hard not to care that they’re ruining it all.

Here’s James, awkward in his skin, a boy on his arm and his family’s eyes crawling over him and then diving away like they don’t understand how to deal with this, with James being James in a way he’s always been but not dared to show off. James at Christmastime is drunk or high, they’re used to that. But this James… family James? Romantic James? That’s a thing they don’t know what to do with. And here’s Fred, tired and overworked, his Ministry papers strewn over the floor in his shared bedroom even though it’s a holiday (activism doesn’t sleep).

Here’s Louis, pulling on the end of Lily’s pigtails, both of them pretending the vicious, selfish history between them doesn’t exist. Lily not mentioning the almost-baby and Louis not mentioning the manipulation, the tears and the fights and the desperate shameful relief they find in each other.

In the top bedroom here’s Lucy, her ear to a recording device, focusing on the aliens she sees in the sky instead of the family down below her, begging for the easy laughter and forgiving love she brings them all. Here’s Rose beside her, not listening to her babble about government cover-ups, trying to pretend she doesn’t have this Sight or this knowledge or this awful sinking awareness that by this time next year her parents won’t be attending this party together and she’ll have a half-sister on her arm, both of them with their father’s hair and their mothers; approach to inter-personal relationships.

Here’s Roxanne, caring so hard about them all she has to pretend not to care or risk drowning. Roxanne, talking to four aunts at once, because talking to her cousins is a battle she came underarmed for. And next to her Albus, high and wrung out with it, nodding along to everything she says because a safe bet on any holiday is to agree with Roxanne, she’ll never get you into anything you regret. She’s a far cry from all Albus’ actual friends, who get him on the front of the tabloids at least once a month, and never for the good reasons.

And last of all here’s Hugo, tucked into a corner of the front sitting room, watching and watching and watching. Not speaking, not laughing, just watching. What can you say to get a word in sideways at a gathering like this? In a family like this? So Hugo watches, and his fingers reach for notes on a guitar currently locked away in a chest, and he dreams up tunes that will be number one singles in not such a long time at all.

Despite all the angst they are happy. Not individually, perhaps, not objectively. But as a general, cohesive whole… they have the fallback of each other, and for them that’s what happiness is. Not individual, but the awareness of their status as a singular whole. Weasleys. Always, forever.


	12. Leonora Greengrass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) Do tell us more about Ron's "secret" child with Daphne please! (Only if you want to of course!)

Leonora Lavinia Greengrass is a Piece of Work. She hears her Uncle Draco call her that through a closed door when she’s nine, and she turns to cousin Scorpius and laughs.  _That’s me,_  she says to him, her ear still pressed against the door.  _A piece of work._

Lo is good at a lot of things and bad at a lot of others. Good things include depending on herself, making other people feel bad about themselves, and fashion. Bad things include empathy, sympathy, and vulnerability. She’s a prickly customer, a real nightmare, a piece of work. Lo gathers all the names to herself and hoards them like gold.

Her mother is not well-suited to motherhood. That’s alright with Lo, because she’s not very suited to daughterhood. They call a truce when Lo is ten: Daphne can do whatever she wants, travel or get boyfriends or anything, and Lo will stop being a bitch about it if Daphne gives her a big enough trust fund and tells her who her father is. Daphne gives her twice the amount of galleons she was expecting, and Lo stops asking about her father.

A lot of the girls in her dorm, when she gets to Hogwarts at last, cry at night. They miss their mothers or fathers or homes or pets or friends. They stay awake at night for hours and hours, clutching their duvets close and trying to muffle their sobs. Lo sleeps like a baby from the minute her head touches the pillow.

There’s a name Lo hears a lot, from her very first week at Hogwarts.  _Rose Weasley_. All the teachers except the ones new that year keep saying it. “Weas- no, sorry, Greengrass, hand out the books please.” “Rose! Rose! Rose, stop talking! Oh, Leonora, my mistake.” “Ro-Leonora. Pay attention.” 

Rose is in the year above Lo. Gryffindor, not Slytherin, but that doesn’t seem to stop the teachers muddling them up. (”My mum always calls me by my sister’s name,” says scrawny Mere Yaxley, and Lo pulls hard enough to hurt on her pigtails. “She’s not my sister, stupid.”) 

Lo wouldn’t say she cares about Rose, exactly, but there’s still some kind of weird connection. She meets Rose’s eyes across the Great Hall every now and again, and she figures maybe sometimes Rose is called by her name too. It’s a funny kind of bond. They never speak, but it’s there. 

Shortly after Lo turns fifteen, she literally bumps into Rose in a hallway. Rose is sat with her forehead pressed into her knees and her hands over her ears, and Lo turns a corner and walks into her hard enough to fall. They go down in a tangle, both spitting, and when Lo gets back to her feet she finds herself looking in a mirror. (”Watch where you’re sitting, Weasley,” she sneers, because she’s nothing if not consistent. “Do one, Greengrass,” Rose snaps back.) They should turn and walk away, both of them, but they linger without knowing why. If Rose’s eyes were black like coal, black like Lo’s, they could be twins.

On Lo’s sixteenth birthday, two weeks before Christmas, her mother sits down in the parlour next to her and says, “Well, it’s time we talked about your father.” Afterwards, when her mother has drifted away and Lo is sat reeling, all she can think about is Rose Weasley, and how much everything makes sense. 

Another thing that Lo has always been good at is anger. She’s good at nurturing it and using it efficiently. That day, though, she finds herself not so good at it. It starts inside her chest and spreads fast, too fast, so she can’t pin it down and beat it into shape. It swallows her whole, and she finds herself on Ron and Hermione Weasley’s front doorstep without being entirely sure how she got there. Rose opens the door, and she just looks resigned. (”They’re in the kitchen,” she says, standing back to let Lo in, “If you cry, my mum will take it out on Dad and not you.”) 

Lo has always known sensible advice when she hears it. She marches into the Weasleys’ kitchen and she stares hard at Mrs Weasley and she says, “My mum says that your husband is my father,” and she holds her facial expression still like ice until her words sink in. Then she bursts into tears. 

Afterwards, while they fight, she sits with Rose in the front room and redoes her make-up. Rose watches her doing it, and Lo figures she’s gearing up to have a go at her until she says, “How do you get your eyeshadow to look like that? It really suits you.” Lo hesitates, and Rose lets her head fall back against the cushions. “I see things. I knew you would come. I’ve known for months.”

Lo’s sure her face is full of question marks, and Rose must feel them because she lifts her head back up again and grins in this odd way, sort of scared and cross and amused all at once.

“I’ve never told anybody,” she admits, holding Lo’s gaze, “not even my parents. It’s weird, you know. When I was little, I always wished I’d get a sister so I could talk to her about it. And now I’ve got you, and it’s not what I meant at all.”

Lo sits there in silence a moment or two longer, and then she pulls a brush out of her bag. “I could do your eyes for you, if you wanted. I mean, I can just do them exactly how I do them myself.” She has always been good at recognising a valuable ally, and an ally with no-one else to turn to is the best kind of ally of all. 

When Ron comes into the sitting room carrying two suitcases, Rose and Lo are sat next to each other on the sofa, intent on Lo’s contouring pallet. Hermione comes in after him, tear-stained, and tries to pin Lo to the cushions with her glare.

“Are you even sorry for coming here like this?”

Lo has started to put all her make-up away, but she pauses at that. She looks up at Hermione and tilts her head, giving it a moment so Hermione can drink in exactly how much she looks like Rose. Like Ron. Just as she’s about to open her mouth and be the cruelest she can be, Rose lays a hand on her arm and squeezes hard enough to hurt.

“Don’t,” Rose murmurs, and Lo astonishes herself and doesn’t.

“I have to go,” she says instead, and stands and heads for the door without turning. On the threshold, she pauses and cranes her neck round to look at her father. “Well,” she says, one eyebrow raised, “aren’t you coming?”

And he does. Out to the front garden and to a café, where they sit awkwardly until Lo has had enough and goes home without a word. Having a father… it’s not something she quite knows what to do with. She’d always thought it would make something undefinable right but instead she just feels off-kilter, like something about herself has changed. When she’d pictured her dad as a kid, he hadn’t been anything like Ron. 

But Lo is also good at tenacity, and sticking things out, and (sometimes) recognising good things when she’s got them. So if she keeps tabs on where Ron is living, and drops in on him every now and again, and starts texting Rose… well, that’s not vulnerability, is it? Not caring too much. That’s just family. Family’s not something she ever thought she could be good at, not when it was just her and her mother. But with a father and two siblings… maybe she could get better.


	13. Ginny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) You said you were taking prompts, right? Would love something along the lines of '5 things Ginny never told anyone'!

**one**. If Ginny is alone she cannot sleep. 

At school, it’s never too bad, there are seven other girls in a dorm with her. If she comes out of a nightmare with her heart pounding, she just has to open the curtains of her bed and look at them. Jenny Mullaney always sleeps with her bed wide open, and Ginny falls a little bit in love with her every time she looks over in the dark and sees her, fast asleep and dreaming, safe and unafraid.

After school, there’s Harry. Mostly, anyway. There’s a couple of years where he goes travelling, and he leaves her alone, and—well, she isn’t proud of what she has to do to get some sleep. Potions can only take you so far, and when it’s been a week and you’ve had maybe two hours of sleep… it doesn’t really matter, anyway. They’re on a break the whole time, he said it himself. Laughing, joking about Brazilian dancers, never meaning any of it. The boys don’t mean anything to her. She just needs some sleep.

The thing is, Ginny Weasley doesn’t sleep alone. She sleeps in an empty bed, an empty room, and a warm quiet boy called  _Tom_  spends any sleeping second whispering temptations into her mind. 

 

 **two**. It’s important to Ginny that people are kind to Luna Lovegood for more reasons than unselfish ones. She likes Luna, sure, and she knows that Luna does not deserve the behaviour she inspires in others. But it’s more than that. It’s always more. 

The thing is, if Luna can hear voices and people can still like her, then Ginny’s probably okay. If Luna can be touched by things nobody else will understand, then so can Ginny. She can. She can. 

 

 **three**. Ginny is terrified of having a child. From the first moment she feels something off with her body, she grows fear like a second foetus. Harry is so happy his whole body is thrumming with it, light in his eyes like she never saw before. How can she tell him this?

It gets worse the closer to the birth she gets. When she’s holed up alone, just her and her twin children, an empty house around her like a tomb, it’s all she can do not to panic herself out of her skin. 

_What if he gets my mind what if he inherits this Dark Lord what if the diary can poison him through me after all this time what if what if what if—_

The baby is born healthy and screaming and as perfect as can be. Ginny holds him tight, and promises to keep the fear buried deep inside herself.

 

 **four**. By the time the third child comes along, Ginny has almost forgotten the fear. It’s the daughter she’s always hoped for, wide-eyed and sunny as a charm, with her mother’s red hair and her father’s narrow face. She’s so lost in happiness that she lets Harry pick this name, too, though she swore never again after the last one. 

She comes to envy Harry as Lily grows up. James is pure Ginny, loud and adoring and too fast to hide the unsurety inside himself. Albus is a little of them both, secretive and vengeful and charming. But Lily has so much of Harry, and Ginny spends a lot of time watching them together wistfully. It’s not that she doesn’t love her sons. Of course it’s not. It’s that she’s wanted a girl for so long, another red-haired girl like her, and she feels like Lily isn’t really hers at all.

 

 **five**. When Lily turns sixteen, Ginny learns to be grateful for Tom Riddle Jr and the diary. It’s her father she’s always been close to but it’s her mother Lily comes to one morning at dawn, still in her pyjamas with her hair in pigtails that reach down to her waist.

“I need help, Mum,” Lily whispers over hot chocolate, her slender hands curled around her mug and her eyes (Ginny’s eyes) boring holes in the table-top, “I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“Make what stop?” 

“All of it.” Lily lifts a hand and gestures to the side of her head. “All… all this.” 

Ginny feels her heart rearrange itself inside her chest. She thinks of the endless letters from the headmistress and the terrifying trips to the emergency rooms and the hidden stash of empty alcohol bottles and the letter she found in Lily’s room last month, the writing spiky and biting and unfamiliar—

( _I wish you’d told me, Lil. I would have been there. It was my baby too. I would have—_

and Ginny had stopped reading, nausea rising in her throat)

“I feel not me,” says Lily now, and Ginny watches a tear drip down her cheek and then be dashed away ferociously, “I don’t want this to be me but I can’t make it stop. I don’t know how to make any of it stop.”

Ginny leans over the table, takes her daughter by the hands, and says, “it’s alright, darling. I know how.”

Lily looks at her disbelievingly, but Ginny just thinks of a battered black diary, and hands stained with blood she didn’t remember touching, and knows at last that there was something good in what Tom Riddle did to her.


	14. James/Lily

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) any chance of something jily for october??

The night Lily finds out she’s pregnant, she cries until it’s light outside.

James comes home at dawn bloody head-to-toe, carrying his invisibility cloak over one arm and his wand loosely, like he wishes he wasn’t holding it at all. 

He’s drawn-out, wrecked, so full of misery that he doesn’t notice Lily’s.

“There was a kid,” he says, hollow, and slumps down onto the settee. “She was three, maybe four. I was running to grab her but this curse, it just… she bled everywhere.”

This war has made Lily a liar. A better liar than she ever wanted to be. She wipes her eyes and sits down beside James and draws him into her, pulling his tall frame into her narrow chest like she can make him climb right inside her for safe-keeping. He folds against her, pliant as a baby, smearing her sweater with blood.

“It won’t happen again.” She knows she comes off convincing. She’s been told she sounds like steel. “It’s why we’re fighting, to stop any more kids dying.”

James’ shoulder is pressing right into their child. She doesn’t know how to tell him.

“It was an Order spell.” He’s talking into her neck, his breath hot against her skin. “I heard Marlene…it was us. Our fault. If we hadn’t been there—” he breaks off, choking on the words, and Lily rubs a hand through his hair and doesn’t say anything at all. What is there that she could?

“Tell me something good, Lil. Cheer me up.” 

He rolls over and lets his head slide down into her lap. Looking up at her like that, he at last sees the evidence of her tears. One hand comes up, worrying, and brushes at the salt-crusted skin beneath her eyes.

“Lily? What’s wrong?”

The words stick in Lily’s throat. She tries to be brave and force them out, but they won’t come. James’ head is right there, next to the child they’ve doomed to a war it didn’t choose.

“I don’t have any good news,” she manages at last, barely a whisper. “It’s the opposite. I don’t know how to tell you. It’s just that… I’m pregnant.”

James’ face goes very still. It’s unbearable. James Potter is a man of motion, everlastingly on the move. The last time Lily saw his face immobile was at his father’s funeral, watching his last living parent disappear into the ground beneath the graveyard.

“The potions,” he says, as quiet as she had been, “you take them, I’ve seen you. You’ve never missed a day. Have you?”

“Last month,” she replies, unable to meet his eyes, “When I got that bug, you remember? I was throwing up for three days straight. I didn’t think then but… but obviously I was just bringing them all back up. And then we—the Thursday, yeah, I’d been feeling better for ages and I just didn’t think that we needed to leave it a week to let them be effective again.”

James looks up at her, still and steady. He’s not accusing. He recognises this as a joint failing.

“Are you sure?”

“I took a test. My period was ten days late.”

His eyes close slowly, and he takes a deep breath. Looking down at him, Lily can see his thoughts chasing each other across his face. A loud thinker, that’s James Potter. Gently, she raises a hand and traces a finger across the lines carved between his eyebrows.

Abruptly, his eyes flash open. Lily can see tears in them, glistening, and her own eyes pool to match.

“A baby,” he says, and Lily realises all in a rush that his voice sounds the opposite of devastated, “a baby, Lil. A real baby.”

“You—you’re happy?”

He sits up in a rush, all legs, and takes her by the shoulders. He’s wild and only just holding it in, practically trembling where he’s touching her.

“I know I shouldn’t be. I know it’s irresponsible, when it’s so dangerous and it’s war and we’re so young and we live in this shitty flat and we could die any single day but—oh, Lil. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

Lily lifts a hand to touch his face and he grins, more broadly than she’s seen him smile in months, and leans in to press a kiss against her mouth. One of his hands snakes down and splays over her abdomen, as softly as though he really thinks he could do the baby any damage from out there.

“A baby,” he repeats against her lips, still wondering, and his fingertips dig in just a little. “It’s magic. It’s properly magic.”

His excitement is infectious. Just for a second, Lily can put all her fear and guilt away to take some of it for herself. 

Then he pulls back, suddenly enough to unbalance her, and all but falls off the sofa.

“I have to tell Sirius!”

Lily starts to laugh. “At least take a shower before you go and bother him.”  
James is scrambling towards the fireplace on his hands and knees, fumbling for the floo powder.

“Shower? Delay imparting the most important news of our entire lives?”  
“I don’t think it’s the most important news of Sirius’ life, James.”

“Au contraire, darling. It is the absolute pinnacle of his entire existence.” And with that, James chucks his floo powder in and thrusts his head towards the flames.

Still sat on the sofa, feeling more positive about the future than she has done in months, Lily curls both arms around her stomach and hugs it tight.

“I’m sorry for the world we’re bringing you into,” she tells the baby inside her, keeping her voice soft and low, “I’m so sorry. But I promise you now—we will die before we let anything happen to you. You will be the safest baby who ever lived.”

“You’ll be happy.” James is back already, has apparently done little more than shriek the news at his best friend and then return. “You’ll be safe and you’ll be happy and we’ll be the best parents ever. You just wait and see.”

He nestles down on the sofa and pulls Lily into him, wrapping her up tight in his arms.

“We’ll be alright, won’t we?” Lily murmurs to him, letting him slide a hand beneath hers to press once more against her stomach. “I mean, we’ll be good parents.”

“Probably not,” he says into her hair, laughter loud in his voice, “but we’ll have a damn good go at it. And we’ll love it, hm? Love it so much. That’s what counts.”

“Yeah.” Lily folds further backwards, letting James bear all of her weight. “We’ll love it so much nothing will ever be able to hurt it.”

James kisses the top of her head.

“Promise.”

“Promise.” 


	15. Albus, James and Lily

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) What are the Potter kids getting each other for Christmas?

Albus comes home from the pub to find the door of his flat ajar and his older brother lounging in his favourite armchair.

“Didn’t I say I’d tell Dad if you broke in again?”

James snorts. “Get over it. I’m here about your Christmas present.”

“It’s December 22nd,” Albus replies, and then, “so what are you giving me?”

“A talking-to.”

“Oh,” says Albus, and throws himself down onto the sofa, “well, that’s shit. Lily’s getting me a Hex-a-more.”

James eyes him up and Albus adopts his most unconcerned expression. He’s sick of his brother, to be honest. He gets into one steady relationship and suddenly he thinks he’s got the right to tell everybody else how to live their lives. Wanker.

“Scorpius around?” asks James, throwing a glance over the messy sitting-room.

Albus shakes his head. “He’s home. His mum’s out of rehab for Christmas. Get to the point, come on. I’ve got stuff to do.”

“It’s about Daisy.”

For the love of Merlin. If one more bloody person tries to get up in Albus’ grill about Daisy fucking Longbottom—

“You know she’s pregnant?”

“Yah.” Albus rolls his eyes. “Like anybody will let me fucking forget.”

James doesn’t speak for a moment or two, and Albus realises too late how pissed off his brother really is. Before he can do anything, James has launched himself across the battered coffee table and laid into him.

“Fuck!” shrieks Albus, dodging a punch, “what the fuck?!”

“You arsehole,” James grunts as he knees Albus in the stomach, “you absolute fucker!”

They tussle for a moment longer, and then Albus manages to get James in a headlock long enough to grab his wand and cast a body-bind hex. He’s distracted by his aching ribs, so it’s not as effective as it would usually be, and James’ arms continue to windmill around as he tries to land another couple of blows.

“Calm the fuck down, man,” groans Albus, hoisting himself up onto the sofa and clutching his ribs, “why do you care, anyway? It’s none of your business.”

James uses both arms to lever himself up onto the coffee table, and then leans backwards for his wand to free himself.

“I care,” he says as his fingers scrabble for his wand, “because we’ve known the Longbottoms since we were born, and I told you last year to end things with Daisy, and I really thought you had more goddamn respect for her than to hook her back in again.”

Albus stretches out, arching his back like a cat, and hisses as his ribs creak in protest.

“If she comes back to me, it’s not my fault.”

“It is, though.” James sits upright and casts a counter-curse, shaking his legs in relief as movement comes flooding back. “You’re a manipulative shit, and you’ve wrapped her so tightly around your finger she can’t make rational decisions about you any more.”

“You fancy her, or something?”

James just gives him a very cold look. Albus is feeling some stirrings of shame, truth be told… but they’re very, very deep down.

“Look, it’s not my problem. She told me she was on birth control, so—”

“Stop.”

Albus nearly continues anyway, but there’s something about the look in his brother’s eyes that makes him hesitate. He’s seen James look angry—seen him lay into several people at once just for looking at him wrong, in fact—but there’s something different about this. Something that looks more akin to Lily’s anger. And Lily’s anger is not something to be trifled with.

“This stops.” James’ voice is low and measured and firm. “It stops now. She doesn’t want an abortion, so you go to Gringotts and you set up a regular childcare payment, and then you go to her and you apologise and then you stay the fuck away from her.”

“That’s not—”

“I am not having you in an abusive relationship, Albus,  _especially_  if you’re the abuser.”

That stops him. “Abuse?”

James’ eyes are cold as the void. “That’s what you are. That’s what you’ve done to her.”

“I  _never_  got violent towards her—”

“Abuse isn’t all about hitting someone,” says James, suddenly looking so sad, “it isn’t. And what you’ve done to Daisy, over all these years, is abuse. Blowing hot and cold, picking her up only to discard her when someone better comes along, pressurising her into sleeping with you—”

“She did  _not_  take any pressurising,” grumbles Albus, but James is a rising tide with no off-switch.

“It ends,” he says, a furious burning star, “it ends now.”

Staring at James across the coffee table, Albus suddenly feels as small as a five-year-old again, caught out by his parents in bad behaviour and still young enough to feel shame for it.

James’ demeanour softens as he sees it, and he reaches into his pocket for something.

“You’re not a bad person, Al,” he says, pulling out a letter, “at least, you don’t have to keep being one. What did Dad always say? We’re our choices, not our instincts. Right now, your choices are making you bad. But you can change that.”

“How?” Albus hates how choked up he sounds. “How can I be anything but this?”

James puts the letter on the coffee table and stands up. “You try. And then you wake up tomorrow, and you keep trying, and you keep trying, until it starts to happen by itself. It’ll take forever for you,” he adds with a sudden smirk, looking like the brother Al’s known all these years, “but it will happen eventually. And you can start with Daisy.”

Albus is shaking his head, but James has no time for that. He just rolls his eyes and tucks his wand into his jeans.

“Get a grip, Al. Stop taking your shit out on the people who don’t deserve it.”

“Oh, like you don’t do that.”

“I did,” James agrees, “no hiding that. But I’m doing my very best to stop. It’s time for us to step up. Dad saved the world, right? Least we can do is not make it any worse.”

“Yeah, play the Dad card,” Albus mutters, but he says it without heat. James just sighs, and turns for the door.

“Go to Gringotts,” he says, “and then go to Daisy. And if I find out you fucked her up again, I’ll tell Lily about the thing with Beth Zabini.”

Albus’ entire body goes cold. “You wouldn’t dare.”

James pauses at the doorway and shoots him a wicked, wicked grin. “Try me.”

Albus waits until he hears his footsteps disappear down the stairs before he reaches for the letter James has left. He recognises Daisy’s handwriting with a bitter spike of guilt, and rips open the envelope before he can change his mind.

A baby scan falls out, but Albus can’t look at that right now.

 _I know you don’t want this,_ she’s written, the ‘t’s crossed with a trembling hand,  _but I do. I’m keeping her. This is your one chance to step up and be the person I know you can be. All this time, Albus, I’ve been waiting and hoping you’ll be the boy you were the first time we kissed. You remember? We were twelve, and you were so nervous you were shaking. I’ve been thinking about that boy you were. I hope he’s inside you somewhere, because it’s his future I want. Stay as you are now and I will take you to court to keep you away from our daughter. But change and we can talk._

Scorpius comes in an hour later to find Albus sat on the sofa, staring at the baby scan, the letter clutched so tightly in his right hand the knuckles are white.

“Came to pick up prezzies,” he announces, sauntering past. He stops when he spots the scan, and plucks it out of Albus’ hand before he can react, whistling as he looks at it. “Shit. Does Daisy know she’s expecting an alien?”

Albus snatches the photo back. “Fuck off.”

Scorpius raises one eyebrow, cool and collected. It’s an impressively disdainful expression, marred only by the bright pink paper crown perched cheerfully on his slicked-back hair.

“What are you getting defensive for? I thought you weren’t having anything to do with it?”

Albus wavers. He’s about to confide in Scorpius when the door opens again and their friend, Scorpius’ distant cousin, sails in. She’s wearing all black, just in case anybody has the audacity to forget it’s  _her_  family who run the House of Black now, and she zeroes in on the scan with astonishing speed.

“Oh,” she says, red lips parting, “you  _are_  going to play dad, then? The rumours are conflicting.”

“Oh, fuck off, Prosperina,” replies Albus darkly, throwing himself back onto the sofa.

“Poor kid,” Scorpius chimes in, and directs Prosperina towards his bedroom, “your present’s hid under the bed.”

“I might be alright at it,” Albus confesses quietly when Prosperina’s drifted off to find her (undoubtedly excessive) gift. “At dad-ness, you know. I mean, I’m twenty three. Not like we’re still at school, right?”

Scorpius wavers on the edge of saying something sarcastic, but then he lets his guard down for a second.

“Mate,” he says, clapping a hand onto Albus’ shoulder, “if you get your shit together, I think you might actually do alright.”

“You’ll have to give up the drugs, though,” announces Prosperina, coming back in with an armful of gifts, “it’s bad for the baby.”

“Pretty sure that’s only the mother,” says Scorpius. He looks thoughtful, and Albus narrows his eyes.

Five minutes later, as the two purebloods are on their way out, Scorpius pauses.

“The drugs thing,” he says, waiting until Prosperina is out of earshot, “I actually, um… I know we’re not, like,  _bad_. But I’ve been seeing this guy at my mum’s facility, and he’s pretty good. He’s really helping me. I’ve got his number, if you want?”

Albus blinks in surprise. He doesn’t know what part of that to deal with first.

And then he takes a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah, man, that’d be cool. Thanks.”

It is Christmas, after all.


	16. Nott Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) Hey, hope you had a good Christmas and New Years! So, I was scrolling through your old blog and this one (as I do...way too often...) because I love your hp headcanons and I was wondering if you could possibly share some thoughts on the nott family? This is random but Theo needs more lobe lbr

The girls are fighting again. Theo can hear them from the hallway, their shouts echoing off the domed ceiling of the pool and bouncing up towards him. He sighs, takes his coat off, and heads for the drama.

Water begins to pool on the corridor’s marble floor as Theo gets closer to the ruckus, and out of interest he bends to taste it. Salt. Curling his lip, he picks up the pace and finally strides out through the wide archway and into the pool room. White columns flute upwards and march away from him, ringing the scalloped-shaped pool. Sunlight ripples off the water, flooding in through the great glass windows that look out over the beautiful Nott Manor gardens, painting Theo’s girls in gold.

Catalina’s reclining on one of the loungers, a cup of tea at her elbow, her sunglasses on, and her attention very deliberately focused on the magazine in her hands. It’s  _Accio!_ , which she denounces around Theo’s friends and gossips about endlessly with her own. Theo can’t help a smile, even as one of their daughters lets out a scream and the water—now lapping at the tops of his shoes—rises another centimetre.

He looks away from his wife and fixes his attention on the two girls. His legacy, his loves, his pride and joy…currently grappling with each other on the gold-plated steps to the pool like hyenas. Cloe, in a daisy-patterned swimsuit, has her elder sister’s dark hair in both hands and is twisting it grimly around her wrists, dragging Astynome down towards the water. Astynome, for her part, has her teeth bared like a snake, one arm locked around Cloe’s neck, trying to pull her down whilst fighting back onto her feet herself.

Theo just looks for a second. Neither girl has noticed him come in; they’re too involved in their death-struggle. There’s something really quite amusing about it—the opulent elegance of the surroundings, each statue and original-Byzantine pool tile dripping wealth and refinement and culture…and then his two little girls tussling like street urchins in the water.

The water rises a little further, Astynome lets out a yell and somehow rolls both of them over and off the steps, and Theo has had enough.

“O que aconteceu?”

They throw themselves apart at the sound of his voice. Cloe splashes up to the steps and pulls herself out, gasping, while Astynome sinks lower in the water and gives her father a flat, blue-eyed stare, lurking just above the water like a shark.

Behind him, Theo hears Catalina put her magazine down.

“Tell me,” Theo says, reverting back to English, “what’s going on? Why are you fighting like this?”

There is silence for a brief second, neither girl willing to break first. But then Astynome pops further out of the water and opens her mouth, and Cloe tumbles into action to get the accusation in first.

“It was her, Daddy, she took my—”

“She was being so annoying, she kept—”

“Hippogriff, that you got me, Daddy, and she—”

“Making this stupid noise and making it fly around in my face, and—”

“She used magic! She did! She crushed it and then she pushed me in—”

“It’s not my fault, she was being such a pain, she was doing it on purpose, I—”

Theo has heard plenty. “Suficiente.”

His daughters fall silent. He can see Cloe’s bottom lip wobbling already, her great dark eyes downcast, filling with tears. Astynome is still in the water, calm and still as a serpent, watching him carefully. She’s always been most like him, after all.

“Which one of you’s made my shoes so wet?”

The girls pause at that. They exchange a quick look, uncertain, and then turn back to him. Neither offers an answer, so Theo lets out a brief sigh and turns to his wife.

“Cata?”

She swallows the smile he can see building and knocks her sunglasses down her nose to fix her daughters with a stern expression.

“It’s both of you, isn’t it?”

They look at each other again, still not sure, and Theo can’t help the sudden and explosive love that shoots up inside him as they make two quiet question marks, neither of them knowing what they’ve done.

“Here,” he says, and goes to one knee. He opens his arms up and Cloe doesn’t hesitate; flings herself around the pool to grab him in a hug, so relieved to be forgiven. Astynome follows slower, but only just, and soon they both have skinny arms wrapped tight around him. He keeps forgetting how big Astynome’s getting now, eleven years old already, so close to going off to Hogwarts and leaving him behind. He squeezes them both tighter, just briefly, until Cloe pretends to start choking to death and he releases them, all three of them smiling now.

He takes their hands and, as they both turn to look, he presses them together. They take hold instinctively, clutching at each other, and stare at him expectantly.

“You two,” he says quietly, tapping their joined fingers, “you’re sisters, you understand? And I know it’s not always easy, being sisters, but it’s the most important thing there is. And it’s frightening now, because Asta is going off, isn’t she?” He addresses this to Cloe, one hand wrapping around Astynome’s arm so she’s not forgotten, but knowing instinctively his snake-cold daughter does not need half the reassurance her younger sister does. “But she’s so brave, she’s going to have such a wonderful time at Hogwarts. She’ll be with Scorpius and Tully and Prosperina, and so many of your other friends. And we need to be brave too, so she can go off without worrying about leaving us here all by ourselves.”

Cloe sniffs, very loud in the quiet of the pool room. He sees her knuckles whiten as she squeezes her sister’s hand, and she mutters, “Sorry, Asty. I didn’t mean to annoy you.”

There’s a pause, and then Astynome squeezes back. “Sorry too.”

Splashing feet echo behind Theo, and then Catalina’s there too, kneeling behind her daughters and encircling them with her arms, holding them all together.

“No matter how far away, you’ll always be sisters,” she says, kissing first one damp arm and then the other. “Look at what you can do together, hm, minhas lobas? See how you’ve created a little ocean right here, just the two of you together?”

Theo flicks some saltwater up at them and they shiver away, giggling, the fight well and truly forgotten.

“Only very special sisters can do that,” Theo tells them seriously, “sisters who love each other the absolute most.”

They blush and shuffle their feet, and then Astynome reaches sideways and pulls her sister into a hug, hiding her face as Theo and Catalina laugh and hug in too, encircling them both in a warm embrace.

“Always a family,” says Theo into a mass of dark hair, the three girls’ curls blending into one, “no matter what, no matter where, always family.”

It took a lot to get him here. Took him a childhood he’d prefer not to think about, took years of loneliness, took ripping every trace of his father out of Nott Manor and replacing it with Catalina’s favourite colours—whites and golds and greys and blues, everything bright and graceful and elegant. Took asking her father for her hand three times, scraping the Dark Mark away right there in front of him, carving his own history out of his skin to earn the chance to marry her.

It was worth it, Theo thinks, gripping at them all harder. Worth going through it all to get here, his knees damp and sore against the pool tiles and the three women he loves most laughing in his arms, Catalina so worried about sending her eldest daughter away and Cloe so worried about being left at home for three more years. And Asta, his lovely Asta, cool and distant and with so much more love than she knows how to show, trying so hard to not be afraid about leaving them for school.

“I love you,” he says into their shared air, foreheads pressed hard together. “All of you, I love you so much, minhas queridas.”

“We love you too,” one of them says back, then another, then all three, and Theo shuts his eyes and prints the moment onto his heart forever, all of them damp and a little sad and a little scared and so, so happy. Always happy, with this.


	17. Durmstrang

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (anonymous) omg please tell me more about durmstrang...where do the catacombs go...how do students get there...what is the eldritch monster in the deep

  * The catacombs go—well,  _everywhere’s_  the boring answer. Nobody’s yet figured out if they really do just happen to join back up at useful places or if, when you walk fast enough and trust in the school, the catacombs mould themselves around you to take you where you need to be. They say the truest students can get anywhere in the school in three minutes flat, even if they’re going from the hall in the castle to the Meteorology Magic classroom in the headland. 
    * “True” is a funny word. True to the school, they say, but that doesn’t mean the students with the best grades or the best athletes.  _True_  means Durmstrang through and through, however that’s defined by the school itself.
  * Durmstrang is a school that sends independent students out into the world. At Durmstrang, you learn to fend for yourself or you’re out. That doesn’t mean strength of arms, though, just strength of character. It starts your first day of first year, when you have to get yourself to the boat. It shows up in the major magical port city of every Northern European country, and you have to be there when it does or you make your own way. 
    * Rumours went round for a while that there was another ship, a ghost ship, following on behind. If you were determined enough to get to school but you missed the main boat, the ghost ship would get you there one way or the other. Nobody’s ever admitted to being on the ghost ship, though. Not publicly.
    * Truth be told, the ship’s a great way to travel. If you’re picked up in the first city, you’ve got two days of total freedom before the ship plunges out of the Durmstrang Fjord and brings you back to school.
  * What is the monster? Nobody knows. All they know is that if you look at it too long, it’ll take the nurse a week to carve the living void back out of you; and with it goes any knowledge of the thing you dared to stare at.


  * There was a time when maps were provided to new students, pointing them to the astronomy rooms at the top of the lighthouse and the potions classes strung along the insides of the cliffs, one after another like a row of peas in a great stone pod. The thing is, nobody is exactly sure that the classrooms weren’t  _moving_ , and it got too costly to continue to reprint the maps fresh every year.
  * When Durmstrang was founded, the witch who created it insisted upon houses to divide the students and teach them unity, to send each out into the world with a dozen languages at their command and friends from all across Europe. 
    * For hundreds of years students have clustered themselves by nationality instead. The Russians take the dormitories nearest the stars, their beds strewn with arctic furs and gold braziers on every wall. The Germans won the best dorms from the Swiss in a contest during the 1890s and sleep there to this day, the great crystal windows looking out into the freezing sunlit fjord. The Finns charmed themselves igloos in a passive-aggressive response to the other students’ teasing in the 1970s, and now every other nationality is jealous of their cosy snowy bubbles, clinging to the fjord’s steep cliffs.
    * It’s a well-known secret that those needing sanctuary from their peers or who don’t fit in with others from their country or those who simply want to follow the founder’s dream can find themselves a bed on the ship, anchored in the middle of the fjord, whenever they might want it. 
  * There are ghosts in the lower reaches. Tread ye lightly.
  * In 2002 a group of Danish students released a yeti into the Great Hall in the middle of exam season. The teachers swore it was caught and released far away, but no student saw it happen, and since 2003 the Polish students have sworn they can hear something huge shuffling around outside their dorms at night.




End file.
